Offcuts

Offcuts is an intimate and beautifully observed collection of short prose pieces by Patrick Hartigan, a Sydney-based painter whose visual sensibility permeates every sentence. Published by Gazebo Books in 2019, the collection gathers over thirty brief narratives - some spanning only a page - that illuminate the extraordinary in the overlooked corners of daily existence.

The pieces move fluidly between continents and moods: a son scatters his father's ashes at a Waldorf school; an artist hangs nudes in a gallery that doesn't entirely welcome them; a man restores a cracked fireplace tile with the patience he can't locate in his painting studio; a grandfather's frail voice brightens over the phone with a joke about a dead woman's usefulness in heaven. Throughout, Hartigan attends to objects - a clock radio on a nature strip, a father's old wallet, a coloured ball returning over a fence - with the care of someone who knows that things hold lives inside them.

Written in spare, precise prose, Offcuts is a meditation on grief, time, art-making, and the strange richness of paying close attention. It is a debut of uncommon maturity and quiet originality.